The Interpersonal Skills LAB has been used with safety professionals across multiple domains including construction and Formula 1 to understand how performance-shaping factors impact safety. Other high-risk teams include deployed media teams, cave divers and diving instructors.

The <<LAB>> has been used in a variety of emergency services environments including paramedics and wildland firefighters. "We learned in one day what it would normally take two or three days of live operations to learn"

Teamwork before frameworks. Modern software development teams use SCRUM and AGILE frameworks to be more effective. However, while they use stand-ups and retrospectives, these processes lack an effective way of developing the non-technical skills to operate as an efficient and coherent team.

Aviation is where crew resource management (CRM) started. The Interpersonal Skills LAB started there too, as a way of bringing CRM theory to life in a low-cost but effective manner. More recently, the same real-world CRM simulators have been applied to great effect in uncrewed/unmanned air systems (UAS).

Healthcare has recognised the value of bringing CRM into the domain, but it can be hard to break down psychological barriers to operate effectively as a team in healthcare simulations. The Interpersonal Skills LAB provides an opportunity to create different team dynamics, allowing authority gradient to be experienced in real-time by those in senior positions. It becomes VERY real.

The Interpersonal Skills LAB can run in a classroom setting, using an open Wifi internet connection to the hosting servers. It can also be run in remote locations using a standalone secure server. This is ideal for those places where internet connectivity cannot be guaranteed or firewalls prevent easy access to the internet. 

The programmes can also be run where the participants are remote but on the same site using radios or intercom as the medium for communication, or they can run via a Zoom meeting where participants are physically dislocated.    

The standard Interpersonal Skills LAB missions (Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Uranus) are scalable from two participants operating, one on the main deck, and one on the support deck, all the way to 20 people consisting of one mission commander, and two on the main deck and two on the support deck for each team, and four teams taking part. We have found that introducing observers that rotate between an operational role and an observer role, provides additional learning.

The Discovery of Nexus module allows a different set of learning to take place, one that is focused on collaborative work rather than competitive work.

Discover of Nexus allows 23 people to operate as one team, where three sit in Mission Contol, and there are four mission teams of five people (e commander, and four mission crew). 

We make use of three main sources of information to provide feedback to the teams involved in an Interpersonal Skills LAB session.

• Observations of the teams' behaviours, actions, and conversations during the live missions. 
• The DEBrIEF process that reflects on both the positive aspects and areas for improvement, based on their perceptions of the events as they happened. 
• The 'black box data' that the <<LAB>> provides is used to measure proxies associated with results-orientated behaviour, team cognitive capacity, communication, collaboration, and attention to detail. 

Over a series of missions, a test-intervention-retest process can be applied, showing that the intervention and feedback are the primary sources of improvement within the team. 

Learning requires a change to happen. This happens at the individual and team level, and ultimately at the organisational level. 

The Interpersonal Skills LAB workshops have two different levels of knowledge/skills transfer. The first is at the mission level when the final item in the debrief is for each mission player (and observer) to answer "What did they learn from this mission to apply to their own operations?"

The other transfer exercise is done at the team level where a discussion exercise takes place between the team members without the facilitators present, and actions are determined going forward, bringing all the lessons identified in the missions to the fore.

These nearly always include the need for more effective pre-task briefs and post-task/project DEBrIEFs.

Discovery of Nexus (DoN) is an add-on module that provides a different perspective.

In a normal <<LAB>> environment, teams are in competition with each other, but in DoN, the four teams plus Mission Command have to work together to colonise a planet. This means we can train more than up to 24 people in one session covering tactical, operational, and strategic leadership and team activities.

The problems faced in the real world like asynchronous communication, incomplete information, competing goals, layered decision-making and time pressures are all encountered in real time. 

"Participating in Discovery of Nexus highlights the areas of friction that plague every organisation, but diagnosis isn’t the point. The beauty of the process lies in evolving methods and testing strategies before putting them to the test in the «real world». For leaders of any level of experience, that’s a rare opportunity." - Dr Benjamin Goodheart, Magpie Human Systems.

We believe in sharing our knowledge. There are more companies than we can server, so we provide a Train the Trainer capability for organisations.

The Interpersonal Skills LAB can bolt into any of your existing leadership, teamwork, agile or development frameworks or programmes - it is a tool and you create the learning environment and learning outcome objectives. This involves a minimum of 30 hours of effort.

Or you can learn more about high-risk operations and non-technical skills, and develop the knowledge and skills so that you can deliver a bespoke Non-Technical Skills programme from Human in the System. This involves approximately 120 hours of effort.